


breathe the breath of the wanting life

by shamecorner



Series: the white wolf and her bard [2]
Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Female Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Female Jaskier | Dandelion, Genderbending, Genderswap, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:27:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25865131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shamecorner/pseuds/shamecorner
Summary: "She calls me love, sometimes," says Gwyn, feeding a log to the fire.The wood is still damp, reluctant to burn, spitting tongues of dark smoke."Well," says Eskel, "why not take her at her word, then?"A story about the things Gwyn wants.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: the white wolf and her bard [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1876882
Comments: 19
Kudos: 320





	breathe the breath of the wanting life

**Author's Note:**

> The first part of the series is [here.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25589635) This takes place directly afterwards, and it's mostly reflections on Geralt/Gwyn's backstory, so it won't make a ton of sense as a standalone work. Warnings for violence and some oblique allusions to dysphoria.
> 
> Title is from the song The Feeling Kind by Thao & The Get Down Stay Down.

"She calls me love, sometimes," says Gwyn, feeding a log to the fire. 

The wood is still damp, reluctant to burn, spitting tongues of dark smoke.

"Well," says Eskel, "why not take her at her word, then?"

Gwyn shifts. The ancient chair, dulled and scuffed over many long winters, creaks a complaint. "She's a fucking poet, Eskel. All her words have five meanings."

Eskel snorts into his beer. He wipes his mouth. "You're deflecting."

"If you knew her," growls Gwyn, but Eskel just chuckles, a smirk creasing his scarred cheek.

"Those are some weak parries, Gwyn." He leans back, crosses his legs. "Maybe you should spar with Vesemir tomorrow. Brush up on your swordplay."

He's throwing her a lifeline, disguised as a jab. She could toss out a lazy comeback and call it settled.

"I don't know how this works, for us," she says, shouldering through the discomfort.

Eskel pauses, scratching at the corner of his ragged lip. "Us meaning witchers in general, or—you and her?"

Gwyn shrugs. "Either."

The log cracks. Sparks dance above the flame.

"You've always made your own Path," says Eskel. "Don't think I can tell you how to walk it."

—

A child with brown hair and the wrong name crouches in the leaf litter, crossbow held in a rigid grip.

"Vesemir," she whispers, "what's wrong with it?"

The man at her side holds a finger to his lips, silencing her with a stern glance.

They wait silently for another glimpse of a tawny hide as it weaves between the pines. The buck steps into view, skittish snorts of breath forming clouds in the chill. Its restless hooves mark troughs in the dirt. Bloodied skin drapes from its antlers.

At Vesemir's signal, she raises the crossbow. The change in posture strains her stiffened joints.

When the buck's broad flank is centered in her aim, she squeezes the trigger.

The bolt lodges in its haunch. Its ugly, hoarse grunt startles a flock of sparrows. The buck bounds frantically into the trees.

"Damn." She'd been aiming for the ribcage.

"You need to improve your breath control." Vesemir stands. "We'll track it down—that's as good a lesson as any."

He treks ahead, stopping to indicate a scoured patch of bark on a tree. A red-brown ribbon lies among its roots, coiled like a dead thing.

"This is its velvet?" she asks, picking up the piece of skin. One side is dense with brown hair. It's a trace she'd been trained to spot, but she's never seen it so fresh.

"The buck's in rut," says Vesemir, nodding. "Haven't you seen a deer shedding before? Velvet's gotta come off somehow."

She had pictured the fine hairs balding gradually, receding into the dry scraps she finds tucked into crevices of bark or discarded among leaves. Not grotesque strips of flesh peeling away from blood-pink bone. 

But then, how would she have known? Vesemir is loath to let her venture past the path encircling Kaer Morhen. She runs The Killer in ceaseless loops, bouncing up against its borders like a fly trapped behind a window. On the rare occasion that Vesemir feels generous, he takes her out to hunt rabbit, or grouse, or, if she's lucky, deer.

Vesemir redirects her focus to a spray of red, dotting the ground with clotting clumps. She follows the buck's trail in stony silence.

Last week, Eskel returned to the keep brandishing a drowner's pale, oozing head.

Three years ago, she'd been at Eskel's side when he woke up on a long table, pallid and trembling, with slitted pupils. Her new guardians answered her questions with fumbling excuses, expounding on the differences between the sexes. They reached a compromise by forcing stewed herbal concoctions and stringy hunks of fungus down her throat. She'd been made stronger, but not like the others. She could sprint, and leap, and swing a sword, but not like the others.

Some offspring are born wrong, and their mothers can smell it. She returns to this long-chewed thought, seeking the deer's tracks with automatic ease. Kaer Morhen's mages must've smelled it too. If they flayed her open genetically, alchemically—what would they find?

There's something strange that ossified inside her; she itches for a way to scrape it free.

They find the buck, stymied by a craggy hillside and too exhausted to move, sitting with its rangy limbs tucked under its heaving torso. Tattered velvet dangles over its eyes.

Vesemir snaps its neck.

He guides her through the field dressing. She drags her knife down its midline, rips out the steaming offal, studying its viscera with hesitant fascination. Animals obey nerve impulses or chemical signals—a series of invisible, inalienable scripts—and it elicits an odd envy within her, to know that they are pulled unthinkingly through the world by the whims of their insides. Too often, she feels the outside bearing down, and wishes for simplicity, or unchanging truth.

Vesemir swings the cleaned buck over his shoulder. They hike along a sparse ridge, bracketed by emerald slopes. The damp smell of cool earth blends with the deer's iron stink.

He stops abruptly, holding up a warning hand. She freezes in place.

"We're being hunted, too," he says, amused.

She fumbles for the hilt of her sword, but Vesemir dumps the buck and rests his large hand over hers, preventing her from unsheathing. "Forktail," he whispers. "You see it? Beyond that spruce."

A flicker of mottled scales. Torn edges of leathery wings. She strains her eyes until the edges of her vision fade into gray specks.

"We'll leave the buck," says Vesemir, low. "The thing's starving. Not worth the fight."

"We could take it," she hisses. She shrinks away from Vesemir's hold.

He says her name, as an admonishment.

Battling Vesemir's will is a futile exercise. She acquiesces, and returns to the keep with empty, bloodstained hands. 

Later, when the moon rises, her anger hardens into conviction.

She creeps through the corridors, slinks to the top of the outer walls, and swings down between the battlements. She is tall—taller, even, than many of the changed boys—and her long reach is a boon as she gropes for handholds in the pitted stone. The texture abrades her callouses. A chunk of skin under her left pinky rips viciously. Not her sword hand, so it doesn't matter. She drops to the ground and makes a fist until the blood stops dripping.

Memory leads her to the rocky slope where the buck drew its last breath. Its entrails are gone, but the hillside is marred by the telltale trenches of forktail claws.

She kneels, and waits.

A shadow passes over the moon.

The forktail crashes into a clumsy landing, weighted by its distended stomach. It flares its wings and tosses its rostral horn. A guttural screech emphasizes the threat display.

But its ribs carve chasms into its flank, and its skin hangs loose from its bony legs. It is slow, and it is weak, and she is stronger.

The forktail flinches from her first blow—she twists into a slash, slicing its wing joint. A rasping cry rends the air, echoed between the mountain peaks. She yanks her sword back. The blade catches on the beast's tense sinew, sending her stumbling off balance. She manages to duck under its flailing tail spikes, but only just.

It tries, feebly, to flap. Its cut wing drags limply at its side. She lunges again. Her next blow glances off the forktail's jaw spines. It winds its body into a tight curl. This time, the flat of its tail slams fully into her side. She hits the ground. The edge of her tongue shreds between her clacked teeth. Her pained breaths splatter strings of red saliva.

She rises again, and again, and again, until the beast slumps, covered with inexpert lacerations, dark rivers of blood catching the silvery moonlight.

Guilt burns in her throat. It took a long time to die.

She hacks the head from its neck and lurches back to the keep, each step a small agony. A rib aches sharply with each inhale. An ankle clicks incorrectly. Gravel grinds in the scrapes on her knees. But with the forktail's horn gripped in one fist and her sword in the other, she staggers to the front gate and clangs the blade against the stone archway, knowing that her mentor will hear her return.

She stirs awake the next morning, squirming in her new bandages.

Vesemir sits at the foot of her bed. His brows hang heavily over his eyes. The lines around his mouth fold deep before he speaks.

"It occurs to me," he says, "that I have done you wrong, little wolf."

Later that year, Gwyn awakens in a different bed, pulled from a more excruciating slumber, and her twitching eyelids reveal slitted pupils.

—

Marshes lounge between the foothills of the Blue Mountains. In the spring, permafrost blocks the draining snowmelt, and it floods up to the surface, pooling around humps of brown grass. Gwyn rides between the blots of water, keeping Roach's reins in a steady hold.

She was the first to leave Kaer Morhen. Lambert had teased her for it—he was rewarded by a whack in the arm from Eskel.

In the distance, a pair of cranes pick among the reeds. They interrupt their strange, meticulous marching to bob, or flap, or trumpet a nasally trill. Roach responds to each call with an irritated flick of her ears. Gwyn pats her neck, offering quiet solidarity.

In moments of monotony—trudging through a flat stretch of land, swatting clouds of gnats—Gwyn's thoughts return, inevitably, to Jaskier. She would have shone like a jewel against the muddy backdrop. She would have made some frivolous comment about the cranes, or tried to harmonize with their awful noise. 

The reminiscing provokes an old instinct. It rears up in Gwyn's chest, ready to quash any pangs of longing, but she soothes it, carefully, until it sleeps again.

Eskel had been right about her deflections. Gwyn knows, in her marrow, that Jaskier's poetry doesn't always obfuscate the truth. When it really counts, she's a focusing lens, sharpening her words to a needlepoint of meaning so that they slide easily under the listener's skin. 

Jaskier had gone to bed with a monster, after that night in the Kaedweni village, and still she gifted Gwyn with a confession in the morning. It would be an insult to dismiss her affection as something else.

And yet, Gwyn hesitates.

It's usually like this: she carves messily through her crooked Path, because she has done little else, and she is made for little else. She attempts to accomplish some moral good, and the world spits in her face; or she reveals a tentative piece of her otherness, and the world spits in her face. Either way: spit in her face.

Jaskier is a baffling exception to that rule. She brightens rooms. She cracks filthy jokes. She softens the scrutinizing glares of strangers. She wrings music from blood and sweat. All this, and Gwyn has nothing to offer in return, save for scraps of love culled from an arduous life.

—

A young witcher with white hair and a new name plods through the snow-drenched forest, dead on her feet.

Behind her, Kaer Morhen is a tiny fleck of stone, lodged in the distant mountains like something stuck between teeth. She'd made that distance in four days, mostly on foot. Her horse had spooked on the first night. There'd be another punishment for that, no doubt. She's already serving a sentence by chasing down a horde of foglets, after being caught red-handed with a stolen jug of White Gull.

Eskel had been found at her side with an identical jug. They were forced to flip a coin for the privilege of foglet extermination. At least he'll be mucking out the stables for another week—a bitter comfort.

Gwyn isn't accustomed to the exhaustion that dogs her steps. Though she had trained for endless, impossible hours in the five years since her Trial, she'd rarely wanted for a meal, or for sleep. The roving horde of foglets emerges in the dark, but without the speed of a horse, Gwyn has to compensate for lost time by tracking in the daylight. No time to rest. It's hellish work, with winter's chill worming into her bones.

The sun slips past its noon peak. She reaches the edge of a cliff, pupils narrowing in the light's sharp glare. There's a dark hollow downslope, wreathed in mist, and a curl of smoke nearby.

One step forward, two steps back. The foglets settled in a cave: a golden opportunity to corner the little bastards and smash them into bloody smears. But their lair lies within a dangerous radius of some hapless traveler's camp. Gwyn grimaces. She'll have to warn them.

Gwyn follows the scent of woodsmoke, entwined with a drier, dustier smell. She turns it over and over in her fatigued mind. It's familiar, but she can't place it, so she ignores the itch in her skull and treks on.

Eventually, the pines grow sparse. Gwyn breaches the treeline, bumbling into a clearing, and freezes like a startled rabbit.

It wasn't a camp. A cabin is tucked into the snow, smoke rising from its squat chimney. More importantly, there is a girl in the clearing: dark hair tumbling over her heavy cloak, pink-cheeked from the cold, biting her lip. She's scrubbing something into the skin side of a pelt, pinned to an upright frame.

A few of Gwyn's slow heartbeats pass before the girl notices that she has an audience.

"Oh!" She jumps, shakes out her hands. "Gods above, I didn't even see you."

She can't be older than twenty. Her bitten bottom lip is flushed, and her upper lip forms a perfect bow.

"Sawdust," blurts Gwyn.

The girl squints, looks down at her sawdust-covered hands. "Huh?"

That was the mystery smell. Sawdust. "Never mind," says Gwyn, shaking the thought from her head.

For a moment, neither of them speak.

"It's easier to finish the skinning outside," says the girl, gesturing at the pelt. "Otherwise the sawdust just gets—oh, hell. Forget that." She bends to wipe her hands in the snow. A strand of hair falls over her ear, and she tucks it back into place. "My name's Lydia. What's yours?"

"Gwyn."

"Good to meet you, Gwyn." Lydia smiles. "Are you alright? I don't mean to offend, but you look like you haven't slept in a year."

"I'm fine," she says. 

Lydia steps closer. Her eyes flick down to the medallion resting against Gwyn's chest, and her brows raise, mouth dropping open with silent awe. "You're one of the students from the witchers' keep, then?"

Gwyn nods, unable to tear her gaze from Lydia's parted lips. Sudden heat drives the cold from her wind-chafed face.

"My dad told me not to talk to the witcher boys," says Lydia, mouth curving into a sly grin. "But you're not a boy, are you?"

"No," says Gwyn, for lack of a better answer.

"Come inside for a bit," says Lydia. "I baked bread today, and we've got enough strawberry preserves to drown a cat."

When Gwyn fails to respond, she adds, "My dad will be gone for a while."

A pinprick of urgency pierces Gwyn's daze. "There are foglets nesting in a cave south of here," she says. "If he's near them—"

"He's hunting in the valley to the east," says Lydia. "He always comes back before sundown, anyway."

Fresh bread and preserves make for a tempting offer. Gwyn's been surviving on hardtack and, regrettably, raw squirrels. 

Lydia stares up at Gwyn through long lashes.

It'll be good to rest, Gwyn decides. To build up strength for her upcoming fight.

She follows Lydia into the cabin. Firelight glitters over a wall-to-wall spread of pelts. Gwyn brushes a curious touch over a lynx's thick coat.

"Dad's a fur trader," explains Lydia, cutting into a loaf on the table. "He hunts in the winter, and we bring the pelts to Ard Carraigh in the spring. Have you been there before?"

"Yes." Gwyn sits and takes a proffered slice, spread thick with preserves. She stuffs it in her mouth.

"Well," says Lydia, already preparing another, "did you like it? I think it's exciting, being around so many people."

"It's loud," mumbles Gwyn, spitting crumbs.

"I suppose it is, a little." Lydia takes a chair at Gwyn's side. "Wow. You _were_ hungry."

Gwyn nods, swallows. "Been on the trail for days."

"Sounds like hard work," says Lydia. She rests her chin in her hand. "You must be very strong."

Gwyn's brain stutters.

"We train a lot," she manages, wiping her mouth on her sleeve.

"Oh, you—" Lydia sits up. "You missed a spot, just—here."

Lydia raises her hand. Her fingers carry the combined scents of sawdust and skin-salt and strawberries. She grazes her thumb along the corner of Gwyn's mouth—her touch stuns Gwyn into stillness, sends a scattered thrill through her locked muscles.

"Got it," murmurs Lydia.

Gwyn examines the grain of the floorboards. "Thanks."

Her nerves sway and shudder like trees in the wind. The feeling catches her wrong-footed. The other boys in Kaer Morhen were like brothers, her instructors akin to fathers, and the sorcerers, proud men who wore their old age like a crown, had never elicited such a response.

She thought it was something that the mutations had seared away.

Lydia lets Gwyn devour half the loaf of bread as they talk. She is bright-eyed and curious, even tolerating Gwyn's mechanical recitation of foglet facts, and she laughs when Gwyn describes the White Gull heist. The pale sunlight turns rich and golden, stretching through the frosted window.

"My dad did get steaming mad, once, when I swiped a bit of his good whiskey," says Lydia, through giggles. "But at least he—he—"

Her words fade, and her brows furrow. She turns to the window, winces against the vivid light that glints in the thin curls of ice.

"The sun's setting," she says. "He should—he's usually back by now."

Frigid dread sinks in Gwyn's gut. She stands, and the table rattles, knocked by the scabbard at her hip.

"Gwyn," says Lydia, "do you think—"

"Stay inside," orders Gwyn. "Don't go near the fog."

She strides to the door.

"Thank you for the food," she says, and she ventures into the cold.

Gwyn presses a hand over the pouch of potions on her belt, feeling for the clink of bottles under the leather. All accounted for. She takes a preemptive dose, for night vision, and the snow flares into an eye-watering glow.

Soon, a scatter of stars dot the sky. Trickles of mist flow between the pines, thickening into an eerie gloom. She spots winding bootprints, and her gloves creak around her clenching fists.

Gwyn throws back another potion, and another. They blaze like fire through her twitching muscles. She swallows hard, battling the aftertaste.

The cave's mouth yawns nearby, and as she approaches, the silhouette of a man stumbles from the trees. A waxy, anemic light pulses inside the cave. He shuffles toward it, as if possessed.

"No!" roars Gwyn, startling into a sprint.

The man whips around. It must be Lydia's father—she sees resemblance in the gentle lines of his face and in the color of his hair, falling in frosted tangles to his shoulders.

But his eyes go wide at the sight of Gwyn, barrelling through the fog, and he scrambles into the cave with a terrified yelp.

It hits her, then, with her higher senses swirling in a dizzying slurry, that she'd just downed three potions in succession.

"Fuck," hisses Gwyn. She tugs a glove off with her teeth; black veins splinter across the back of her hand. The man saw an ink-eyed monster. It was only natural to run.

Gwyn draws her silver sword and stalks into the cave. The mucousy snarls of the foglets buzz in her ear. The man hasn't yet been injured—there's no stale metal odor of oxidized blood—but there is an overpowering stink of fear-sweat.

A clump of fog at her side rises and bursts, spitting out a gnarled, bony mass.

She dispatches the foglet with a quick blast of Aard. Its skull cracks against the cave wall. Suddenly there are more immaterial cocoons, more foglets clawing into existence, and their clicking growls are overwhelmed by a man's shout.

Gwyn dodges between the foglets, running into the depths of the cave. She finds Lydia's petrified father huddled against the wall, shielding his face as he ducks below a swipe from an emaciated arm. She knocks the foglet back with another Aard and follows it to the ground, piercing her blade into its eye socket. It squeals as it dies.

She casts a hasty Quen around Lydia's father, igniting the cave with radiant orange light. Then, she leans into the low, crimson whispers of the elixirs that stain her blood, spinning and striking with preternatural speed, chopping chunks from each lunging foglet.

When it's done, she can barely speak. The potions reach inside her, twisting and pulling, and she can feel every spatter of foglet slime clinging to her skin. 

Gwyn turns to Lydia's father and dispels the shield. "You're safe."

The man's panting quickens. His eyes dart wildly.

"Safe," repeats Gwyn. "They're dead."

"Get back," he stammers. "Back—get away!"

He can't seem to focus on anything—she realizes slowly that the cave is too dim for human eyes to parse.

Gwyn sheathes her sword and lights a tiny fire with Igni, holding it in her upturned palm. She bends down, offers a hand.

Lydia's father surges up, shaking like a cornered dog, and stakes a hunting knife in her thigh.

Instinct grips Gwyn by the brain stem and yanks. She shoves her burning palm into the man's cheek. He screams a long, harrowing, human scream.

Awareness leaks into her mind. She lurches backwards, snuffing the flame. The man is limp. The greasy scent of his flesh floods the cave. She pulls the knife from her thigh, and the pain is artificially muffled, barely more than a patter within her leg, but she staggers to the opposite wall and vomits.

She spits the last of the bile, and then she can hear again. Lydia's father is breathing. Tenuously, but breathing.

Gwyn hauls him into her arms. She doesn't—can't—look at his face. 

Foolish mistakes, one after the other.

She carries him through the monochrome night, between the black stripes of the tree trunks, uphill to the little cabin in the clearing. She lays him down in the open snow and retreats beyond the treeline. The man looks like a corpse, despite his rising chest.

Gwyn digs up a rock and hurls it at the window. Her aim is true, and it lands with a resonant thunk. She slips away.

Shame circles her heart like a carrion bird. 

Behind her back, a wooden door squeaks open, and the quiet is broken by hitching sobs. 

—

"She doesn't see things in black and white," says Gwyn, lifting Roach's fetlock. "She sees me, in the space between."

She digs a pick into the hard-packed mud under Roach's hoof.

"Fuck this marsh," mutters Gwyn.

Roach snorts.

"Yeah."

Her camp is set over the sturdiest soil she could find, but there's still a pervasive moisture that sags in the air. She hadn't been able to coax a fire from her bundle of damp twigs; they lay Igni-scorched in a circle of stones.

Gwyn scrapes at the dirt. "I guess it's in the nature of an artist," she says, between grunts of effort, "to find beauty in ugly things."

Roach tosses her tail, shifts her weight.

"Hush," says Gwyn. "Little bit of ugly is good, sometimes."

Gwyn frees Roach's hoof. She straightens, claps dirt from her hands. "All done."

Roach bumps her head into Gwyn's shoulder.

"Contain your gratitude," says Gwyn, stroking the soft bristles on her nose. "You're embarrassing me."

—

A witcher with a hidden name and a tagalong bard walk through a rolling, sun-soaked prairie.

They're between contracts, seeking rumors of a noonwraith haunting a tiny Temerian village, but their destination is a day's travel away. Jaskier flits ahead, matching the pace of the sparrows that skim over the ocean of green. She extends her fingertips, brushing a cluster of blush-colored blooms.

"Geralt," she calls, "why in the world isn't _this_ place called Dol Blathanna? It's far nicer than the actual Valley of the Flowers."

Jaskier is draped in an uncharacteristically practical dress. Sturdy cotton, loose sleeves. The wind sweeps through her hair like a gentle hand.

"Don't think it has a name," says Gwyn.

"Well, I'm naming it, then." Jaskier plucks a pink flower. "Welcome to Better Dol Blathanna."

"Not very catchy."

"Piss off. I write songs, not maps."

"Unfortunately." Gwyn tugs Roach away from a tempting patch of weeds.

Jaskier rolls her eyes. "Ha. Very funny. It's not like you could do better—you would've just named it Big Meadow Number Seven, or something along those terrible, boring lines."

Gwyn hums. She draws her shoulders back in a subtle stretch, inhaling as deeply as the binder will let her. The smells of warm earth and petals compliment the trace of Jaskier's herbal soap.

"Oh!" Jaskier skids to a stop, pointing. "Geralt, look!"

She does: grass, and flowers, and a vast, blue sky. She turns to Jaskier, asking a question with her creased brow.

Jaskier waves her finger. "The flowers—all the yellow ones! Aren't they beautiful?"

There's a broad stripe of golden blossoms ahead. Small, delicate things. Jaskier wades into them, and they bow in her wake, swaying against her ankles. 

She grins over her shoulder and flops to the ground.

The short waves of her hair twine through the stems. A few brave petals brush her cheek. She laughs, free and deep, spreading her palms over the blooms.

In that moment, the ache of wanting is keen enough to pry Gwyn's skin apart.

Jaskier is—

Gwyn digs a nail into the meat of her thumb.

Jaskier is going to get pollen all over that dress.

Gwyn sinks into a place adjacent to consciousness, grunting stiffly when Jaskier bounds up with a fistful of yellow flowers and tucks one under the curve of her pauldron.

"Gorgeous," says Jaskier, stepping back to admire her work. "Perfect juxtaposition of themes, here. Growth and—um. Death?" She flaps a dismissive hand. "Whatever. I've outdone myself."

She flounces away, grass-stained, smelling like spring.

—

Gwyn rides through a shabby hamlet clinging to the banks of the Gwenllech. She has no intent to stop.

But she does, for the music.

The voice is unmistakable, familiar as Gwyn's own breath, drifting from a rickety tavern. She ties Roach to a fence and follows the song inside.

The tavern is too small to host a stage. Jaskier is perched on a table, strumming something lively to the beat of tapping feet. Floral patterns glitter over her cobalt bodice. Her lyrics arc and twist, agile as a swallow's flight. Gwyn lurks against the far wall until the song unrolls, fading away with a simple phrase, repeated, like a prayer. Then, she steps into the light.

Jaskier's brows twitch up. Her stage smile widens into a beaming grin.

"Afraid that's all I've got, everyone," she says, jumping to the floor. She crosses the room in a few long, clumsy strides, ignoring the disappointed murmurs of her audience, and launches herself at Gwyn, punching a quiet huff from Gwyn's chest. Her arms snare Gwyn's torso.

"My handsome White Wolf," mumbles Jaskier. She leans back, and there's a faint imprint of Gwyn's medallion on her cheek. A hand sneaks up to card through Gwyn's hair. "You've gotten quite fluffy around the sides here, haven't you? No razors in Kaer Morhen?"

"I like when you do it," says Gwyn.

It's odd, still, to acknowledge the things she wants. A strange habit picked up from a mouthy bard.

Jaskier's eyes go syrup-soft. "I missed you," she says. "Come on, we're going to my room."

She drags Gwyn upstairs, slams the door, and throws herself back into Gwyn's arms.

"Gwyn," she murmurs. "Hello, Gwyn. Gwyn, Gwyn, Gwyn. I didn't get to say your name for ages." She inhales. "Gods, is it weird that I love how awful you smell right now? It probably is."

Gwyn strokes down Jaskier's back. "Not a lot of baths in the wilderness, Jaskier."

"Trust me, I'm aware."

Gwyn tucks her chin over Jaskier's shoulder. "You smell good." Like brewer's yeast, and rosewater soap, and the faint bite of sweat.

Jaskier breathes a blissful sigh. "Oh, love, your eloquence astounds me."

There's that word again.

"Is that what we are?" asks Gwyn, ripping the rooted words from her throat.

Jaskier steps back, leaving her arms locked around Gwyn's waist. "Hm? What do you mean?"

"In love," says Gwyn. "Are we?"

She tilts her head. "I'd say so. Wouldn't you?"

Gwyn traces the space between their bodies with a wary eye, trying to dig out the words. "You're—important to me. But there's a lot I can't give you. Stability, or safety."

"Darling, if I wanted those things, I would've left you a long time ago," counters Jaskier.

Gwyn runs a restless thumb along Jaskier's collar.

"Don't tell me you've spent the entire winter _brooding_ about this," says Jaskier, her grin going crooked.

"Might've," says Gwyn.

"Fool," says Jaskier, fondly. "I'll lay it all out then, shall I? You're a grumpy wanderer with a penchant for violence, and I'm a flighty, perpetually penniless floozy. You're terrified of burdening people with your excruciating presence, and I can't keep myself from falling arse over tit for anyone who looks at me sweetly enough. We go entire months without so much as exchanging letters. We even fuck other people. It simply won't work between us, will it?"

Gwyn's jaw tenses.

"But I'll tell you a secret," whispers Jaskier. She nestles into Gwyn's neck, turning her head so that her lips brush Gwyn's jugular vein. "None of that rubbish matters, as long as we both want this enough."

The tension drains. Gwyn presses a kiss to the crown of Jaskier's head. She tightens her arms around Jaskier in a harsh, greedy embrace.

"I love you, Gwyn," says Jaskier. "Don't overthink it."

**Author's Note:**

> I really appreciated all the lovely comments on the first part of the series, so thank you! I'm enjoying this AU a lot, and if you have suggestions for other fics or want to play with these versions of the characters yourself (given that you credit me and also drop me a link!) go nuts.


End file.
